The idea of ‘family’ is thus very powerful, at least in the contemporary cultures of Europe and the New World. At the same time, family lives have been under constant scrutiny from all sides – from family members themselves, politicians, professionals, and media pundits. And this scrutiny does not seem to be abating, as people and governments struggle to deal with anxieties about the complexities and uncertainties of changing and diverse communities in a globalising world. How do

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experiences of being an older person are shaped through a historical and mutually constitutive process involving an interplay between the personal, work and welfare; and the points of continuity and difference this interplay illuminates;

personal experiences of being older are constituted not only through age divisions, but also through loci of social difference and inequality organised around class, (dis)

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The fertility decline in Britain was not the direct result of social policy aimed at reducing the birth rate. The deliberate use of birth control was widely condemned as unnatural and immoral by the medical profession, the church and a wide range of conventional opinion, even though doctors and vicars were the first to limit their own families. There was widespread ignorance about the mechanics of human reproduction and how to control it, but for those in the know there were many methods of c

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The oil industry is perhaps the archetypal globalised industry. Dominated by a few multi-national companies, it is highly centralised at the level of corporate power but, like corporations, investment and trade in the oil industry are also highly mobile. The long reach of the global oil economy is a consequence of the distance between the location of significant oil reserves and the location of the major markets for oil. The reserves of oil currently expected to last more than fifty years are

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We can divide texts up by the medium in which they appear. This is a broad division that is technologically based. It may seem excessively obvious, but it can be quite revealing. For example, different media have different periodicities (frequency of appearances) – most magazines appear weekly or monthly, while newspapers are weekly or daily. Episodes of television programmes are most commonly also weekly or daily, but films appear on a different basis altogether, since, like books or CDs t

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Ned Beck's July 4th Ned Beck continued writing in his diary throughout the summer of 1880, so we have his first-hand account of Holton, Kansas' 4th of July festivities. Holton planned to hold a community picnic on July 3rd, since July 4th fell on Sunday that year, but it was an unusually rainy summer and that Saturday was no exception, so the celebration was somewhat subdued. Just like kids today, Ned's favorite part of the holiday was the fireworks. Here's his description of the events of that week.Author(s): No creator set

There is a construction of poverty that identifies it as a necessary feature of social life: some people will be better endowed, try harder or be more successful than others, and inequality will be an inevitable result (see, for example, Herrnstein and Murray, 1994, who argue that low levels of intelligence are the main determinants of poverty in the USA). Interfering with this natural order of things is dangerous, particularly because it prevents poverty acting as a spur to try harder. This

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A physical quantity such as weight has the property that it can take on any value, not just a finite set of values. For instance, at one time the ingredients in the scalepan could weigh 29.2569427 grams, at another time 125.1234659 grams, at yet another 2805.87625922 grams. It may not be possible for the scales to display such values, but they are physically possible. Quantities like weight whose values can take on any value in this way are said to be analogue.

Figure 3 may help

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If computers encode the denary numbers of the everyday world as binary numbers, then clearly there needs to be conversion from denary to binary and vice versa. You have just seen how to convert binary numbers to denary, because I did a couple of examples to show you how binary numbers ‘work’. But how can denary numbers be converted to binary? I'll show you by means of an example.

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A stand-alone computer receives data from a user by means of input devices. The two most commonly used input devices are the keyboard and the mouse. A computer sends data to a user by means of output devices. Data may be output via devices such as a screen or a printer.

There are many different ways of getting data into a computer. For example, a scanner converts images and texts into a format that can be processed by the computer and displayed on screen. Devices such as t

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You will, perhaps, by now be getting a sense of the challenge of setting up an identification system on a national scale. However, for many routine purposes, establishing who a person is from an entire population of possibilities is not what is required. Instead what is required is confirmation that the person is who they claim to be. This is verification. An example of verification happens when you collect a parcel from a depot. You are sometimes asked to show your driving licence, pa

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In the discussions of newsgathering in the Taylor and Higgins papers, you saw the significance of the development of systems that allowed long-distance transmission of electronic signals. Initially transmission used metallic wires (remember Taylor's reference to the importance of the ‘lines infrastructure’ and his mention of the ‘wire picture’) and later wireless transmission (terrestrial and satellite microwave) became important. In this section I shall look at some aspects of the tr

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If a use case incorporates a scenario that is significantly different from the main success scenario, you may decide to create a new subsidiary use case. There may even be a need to create more than one subsidiary, depending on what happens in different circumstances. For example, when making a reservation in a typical hotel the receptionist would first determine whether the guest was already known to the hotel (among other advantages, this would speed up the reservation process since re-ente

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Forming Possessive Nouns In this lecture, an instructor talks about how to use apostrophes to make nouns possessive. The teacher does provide some useful information, but the typed sentences she shows on the screen are not readable. (02:48)Author(s): No creator set